Re: Cobalt root exploit

[jlewis () LEWIS ORG (Jon Lewis)]

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Patrick Oonk wrote:

> An individual obtained password information from history
> files on a Cobalt RaQ. With the RaQ, user directories are
> contained within the web tree. This is intentional since
> the purpose of our servers is for users to serve content
> on the web.

> and a private directory. However, if a user telnets into
> the box and runs various shell commands, the bash shell
> maintains a .bash_history file.

I emailed Cobalt about this issue back in 12-98.  I had a Qube on eval and
noticed that the combination of user home directories being within the web
server's document root dir and the default umask setting making user
created files world readable meant that I could use a web browser to check
for .bash_history files in each user's directory...mine of course had one.

I was told by Will DeHaan <will () cobaltnet com>, that Cobalt really didn't
intend to have users logging into the Qube for interactive shell sessions,
but that they still planned to rearrange things such that each user home
directory would not be in the web server's document root and would instead
have the equivalent of a public_html dir.  This change was to be
integrated into future software releases.

----don't waste your cpu, crack rc5...www.distributed.net team enzo---
 Jon Lewis *jlewis () lewis org*|  Spammers will be winnuked or
 System Administrator        |  nestea'd...whatever it takes
 Atlantic Net                |  to get the job done.
_________http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key__________